I used to have a very recognizable nine-to-five. I even made a day-in-the-life video about it: open the laptop, write some software, speak to some humans, drink coffee, repeat. Looking at it now feels a little like watching found footage from a previous life. Same person, different operating system.
For 10 years I did what ambitious software people are supposed to do. I learned, took on more responsibility, helped teams move, and kept climbing. Then I arrived at the role I thought would be the peak of that climb and discovered something awkward: I did not want to live there.
The career ladder looked like the destination
I started as a web developer, moved into mobile, became the lead of a small team, then led across multiple teams, and eventually became an engineering manager. Each step made sense. More scope, more influence, more grown-up words in the job title. That is progress, right?
And to be clear, I liked parts of it. I like strategy. I love helping people do their best work. I like seeing the bridge between a technical decision, a product, and the human who eventually taps the button. I have always seen myself as someone who builds those bridges.
But somewhere along the climb, the work started moving farther away from the thing that gave me energy. The higher I went, the less I made. My calendar became the product. My deliverables were conversations about other conversations. I had successfully optimized myself out of the part I loved.
Then I became an engineering manager
Engineering manager had sounded like the final boss of my career. When I finally started doing it, the fantasy exploded pretty quickly in front of me. The problem was not leadership. The problem was how easily leadership gets confused with meetings, status rituals, organizational politics, and very expensive adults trying to remember what they agreed in the previous call.
I cared about where we were going. I just did not want to spend my entire week narrating the journey. There are only so many times you can plan the meeting about the meeting for the deliverable before your soul quietly opens LinkedIn Jobs in another tab.
I had successfully optimized myself out of the part I loved.
I missed the pixels
What gives me energy is building stuff. Moving the pixels until an interface feels right. Shaping the database so the product can grow without falling over. Finding the weird edge case, fixing it, and making somebody's day slightly easier without them ever needing to know my name.
I love software that helps people and moves people. I love taking a vague idea and making it real enough to click. Talking can support that work, of course. Strategy matters. Collaboration matters. But at some point the conversation has to turn into a thing. If building a small, useful feature takes months, the code is rarely the only thing that is broken.
“Vergadercultuur” or: meetings about meetings
In Dutch we have the word vergadercultuur: meeting culture. It is a beautiful compact word for a sprawling, time-consuming thing. This German parody captures it perfectly: two minutes of actual work and 478 minutes of meetings. Nearly eight hours spent discussing work, leaving just enough time to open your editor and immediately close it again.
I can laugh at that because I recognize it. I can also feel it in my body. Sometimes I walk past one of those giant open-plan offices and my shoulders climb toward my ears before my brain has even formed an opinion. Apparently the nervous system keeps better meeting notes than the rest of us.
Remote work taught me a different way
At Stream, I learned what genuinely asynchronous work could look like. One teammate might be on Mountain Time, another in Central Europe, another in Sydney or somewhere on the Pacific coast. Getting everybody into the same recurring call was not collaboration; it was a minor crime against time zones.
So we wrote things down. We recorded Looms. We made decisions visible and gave people room to respond when their brains were actually awake. Remote work was not sitting at a kitchen table while recreating the office through video calls. It was trusting people, communicating clearly, and letting focused work happen.
Working from a proper home office—or anywhere that lets you work well—also returns the commute to your life. That time can become sleep, family, exercise, staring out of a window, or absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing is wildly underrated.
Later, at MyWheels, I learned a lot and we built beautiful things together. I am proud of that work. I also found myself back in a more familiar Dutch-company rhythm, with more meetings and more synchronous coordination. It clarified something important: I did not want to organize my life around a calendar full of calls again.
The part of me that wanted to make things
Long before software management, I had a band. This was roughly 20 years ago, which is impossible because I am obviously still 27. There is video evidence, and yes, it is funny. But watching it also reminds me of a version of myself that made things because making them felt alive. We did not hold a quarterly alignment session about the song. We played it.
That creative part never disappeared. It just became harder to hear underneath responsibilities, titles, Slack notifications, and the belief that serious careers should look a certain way. Becoming an indie developer is partly about turning the volume back up.
Burnout is a very rude product manager
Burnout eventually made the mismatch impossible to keep politely ignoring. It was not one dramatic event. It was a total systems failure: my relationship with work, with the people around me, and with myself stopped fitting together. Opening the computer was no longer fun. Everything felt heavy, including things I normally loved.
Your body tends to notice these things before your career plan does. Mine had been sending increasingly unsubtle notifications, and I kept swiping them away. Eventually it removed the snooze button.
I do not think burnout arrived to teach me a neat lesson. I would have preferred a strongly worded email. But recovering forced me to ask better questions: What kind of work gives me energy? What does enough look like? What am I trying to prove, and to whom?
More than once I thought about ‘de handdoek in de ring gooien’—throwing in the towel completely. Sell the house. Buy a farm. Work the land. Become one of those software engineers who spends 10 years optimizing distributed systems and then decides the real scalable architecture is a vegetable patch.
The fantasy was tempting because it promised distance from everything that had drained me. But when I separated the craft from the culture around it, the answer became obvious: I did not want to stop building software. I still truly loved it. I wanted to build in a way that helped people, felt creative, and left enough room for an actual life.
So I became an indie developer
I want to work on my own terms—not because I want to work alone, but because I want the work itself to be the center again. I want to choose useful problems, collaborate with good people, build bridges, and still have enough quiet to build the actual bridge.
I am not starting from zero. I am carrying 10 years of code, products, teams, mistakes, friendships, scar tissue, and opinions about React Native. The point is not to erase that career. It is to use everything it taught me in a way that feels more honest.
stevegalili.com started from that idea: a small home for the things I build, the things I learn, and the experiments that might become products. Some of those products are already taking shape. I am extremely stoked about them, which is a sentence I have missed being able to say without scheduling a stakeholder review first.
Building in the agentic era
The timing is strange. Building software in the agentic AI era is exhausting, disorienting, and fucking awesome. The tools change every week. The edges are sharp. Half the job is learning what became possible while you were asleep.
But it also feels like an extraordinary moment to be small, curious, and willing to move. A single developer can explore ideas with a speed that used to require a team, a roadmap, and 6 meetings. The challenge is not generating more noise. It is keeping your taste, your judgment, and your humanity while the machines help with the typing.
The biggest change for me is not a new framework or business model. It is learning to listen earlier—to the excitement, to the resistance, and especially to the body.
Mental health is not a side quest you finish after shipping. It is part of the system everything else runs on.
My best ideas rarely arrive while I am forcing myself to stare at a computer. They arrive on a walk, in the shower, while talking to somebody I love, or while doing absolutely nothing useful. Then I come back, open the laptop, and move the pixels.